The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead: Difference between revisions

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 <blockquote> He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the “deep layer,” as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works. (Naked ) </blockquote>
-In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the objective experience of trauma.
+In this passage, the content of the narrative reflects the experience of the trauma of war—following traditional narrative paradigms of arithmetic and geometry. However, the structure of the narrative creates from the experience of trauma—engaging the narrative exploration illustrated by the changed understanding of space, time, and place occurring in reaction to trauma experienced. In this calculean movement in the novel, Mailer’s narrative focuses on representing the many aspects of the experience of trauma—not only the limited subjective or objective presentations but also the abjective experience of trauma.
 In ARIT, the narrative perspective illustrated focuses on Richard Cantwell expressing his displeasure at the attempt to re-make the traumatic abject actions of war trauma emblematic of subjective patriotic glory and objective nationalistic sacredness. Cantwell remembers his experience of war and battle stating that, “that was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut . . . how many could you tell like that? Plenty, and
+{{pg| 324 | 325}}
+what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war“ (). In this passage, Cantwell’s recollection centers on engaging the abject inconceivability of war and trauma represented by the animals eating the soldier’s corpse. Further, the passage also reveals a tension with subsequent attempt to normalize the unbearable condition of witnessing this atrocious act of war. The passage from ARIT illustrates the narrative shifts constructed in relation to tension appearing when attempting to engage the abject experience of the traumatic events of modernity in the structure of a narrative. In this passage, as in the passage from NAD, Hemingway represents the experience of trauma in war in the content of the narrative and, also, attempts to embody the abject experience of war trauma in the structuring of the narrative—a structure that gives voice to the abjective more than the subjective or the objective.
+Mailer’s focus on the traumas of war and experience reflects and creates in the narrative the testimony of questioning and confusion of the trauma of war. For Mailer, the narrative presentation of the traumas of war embodies knowledge of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic experience. Thus, as he constructs his structures of fiction, Mailer oscillates between reflecting a testimony based on experience of trauma and creating a fiction drawn from the impossibility of understanding the experience of trauma.
+At the end of NAD, General Cummings is presented as reflecting and creating his views on the ending of the offensive. Cummings is observed in the structure of the narrative as feeling that
+<blockquote> [f]or a moment he almost admitted that he had had very little or perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any victory—it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend. He allowed himself this thought, brought it almost to the point of words and then forced it back. But it caused him a deep depression. () </blockquote>
+Mailer’s focus on the observations illuminate a parallel between Hemingway’s Cantwell and Mailer’s General Cummings, two military men whose war service is not punctuated with the glory of victories but defined more by the experience of defeat. The narrative parallel illustrates the connection between fiction and tragedy. The fictive tragedies
+{{pg| 325 | 326}}
+written following the World Wars seek to address a cultural amnesia concerning the trauma of the war. The structuring of these tragic narratives seeks not to operate as tragedies of the subjective flawed hero or objective doomed polis. Instead, the structure of these modern tragedies operates in narratives that speak from and to the abject nature of tragedy: the suffering, the destruction, and the distress experienced in the darkness of war—the dark knowledge too heavy to bear yet too important to silence.